Rearranging plot points

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

A while back, I got asked about rearranging plot points. It was a difficult question to answer, because the usual definition of plot points seems to have hardened around the growing number of carefully described linear story structures. If that’s your definition of plot points, the answer to “How do you rearrange plot points?” is simple. You can’t, not without destroying the structure they are part of.

Describing story structure as a particular sequence of plot points requires those points to stay in order. Whether your list of plot points goes “Hook, Inciting Incident, First Pinch Point, Midpoint, Second Pinch point, Plot Turn, Climax, Resolution” or “Beginning, Problem introduction, First Act Climax, Ascending Action, Twist, Disaster, Second Act Climax, Story climax, Wrap-up” or all twelve of the steps in the “hero’s journey” or one of its variations, they have to happen in order, because they are a linear description of a particular story structure.

I do not find that particularly useful. When I talk about “plot points,” I’m talking about specific events or information in a particular story. Meaning, “rearranging plot points” is not about moving generic labels that already belong in a linear sequence. It’s about changing the order in which key things happen in a particular story, OR changing the order in which those key things are told to the reader. Does the detective find the bloody handkerchief first, or the incriminating emails? Does the hero get stabbed in the pub before or after the dance…and how is the dance affected depending on whether he’s wounded at that point or not?

Many stories present events and information to the reader linearly, because both time (chronology) and causality work that way. Jack’s magic beanstalk cannot grow unless and until Jack’s mother throws the magic beans out the window; the mother can’t throw the beans out unless and until Jack has traded the cow for them. Those are dependencies of time—in the world of the story, they have to happen in a specific chronological order.

However, the writer does not have to present these events to the reader in the same chronological order in which they happened within the story. There are large bags full of writing tools that re-order chronological information: flashbacks, starting in medias res, changing how and when the viewpoint character hears about or notices something (especially something that happened offstage), unreliable narrators, various nonlinear story structures that deliberately tell events out of order.

Rearranging key story information or events when a story is truly linear usually requires using these tools, because changing the chronological order of key events tends to range from difficult to impossible in such stories. The writer can change the point at which the reader is told about an event, but changing things so that the magic beanstalk grows before Jack has swapped the cow for magic beans makes no sense within the story as it stands.

If the author wants to have the beanstalk before there are beans, the reader needs to be presented with an explanation for how it got there. Explaining the beanstalk does not have to be done before the beanstalk appears, but the longer it takes to get to the explanation, the more rewriting is likely to be necessary. This is true whether the explanation is “it was deliberately planted by the giant’s nemesis to inconvenience the giant” or “This entire world is a surreal landscape based on a combination of Salvador Dali and Escher, and it does not follow normal rules of cause and effect.”

Actually re-ordering key events is therefore most commonly done during the planning stages, when changing the chronology involves swapping two bullet points (say, “Jack steals giant’s harp” and “Jack steals giant’s gold” because the author realizes that stealing the harp will wake up the giant, which would mean Jack couldn’t come back for the magic harp). Sometimes, though, the writer doesn’t realize until midway through the story that two events need to be swapped, and the swapping process therefore requires more thought and potential rewriting.

That’s how it works for a single, linear storyline. Some stories, however, are modular, and in my experience that not only makes moving key events around easier (as long as they are in different modules), it often makes moving them necessary during the process of writing the first draft.

For instance, when I was writing The Dark Lord’s Daughter, Kayla (the protagonist) was faced with several problems and/or key events that were related, but that did not have to happen in a particular order. Sneaking down to the pub with her cousin could happen before she talked with her half-sister about the future, or it could happen afterward. Discovering the chained mountain spirit could happen before or after either the pub trip or the conversation, or between them.

The three incidents were all key story events (aka plot points), but they were not tied to each other chronologically. They all had to happen after Kayla’s arrival and before the climax, and each point needed its own setup. They all affected each other because once an event happened, it pinned certain characters and information to specific places and times. But I could put the events themselves in any order I wanted.

And I did. I think I moved those events around in every possible order and timing. I tried making them all happen on the same day in different orders. I tried spreading them out over several days, again in different orders. Eventually, I settled on what’s in the book, with Geneviev’s scenes split up and the other two happening on the same night. That had the best flow, and fit better with other things in the story.

That is all a bit of a simplification, as there were other scenes I’d classify as modules. In Kayla’s specific case, a lot of the mid-book plot points involved meeting different characters and discovering their issues (and there were a lot of characters). The order did not matter initially; it was only during the first draft that I realized that moving them around would affect things like pacing and tension and the story’s emotional underpinnings